Crypto-Anarchist Says Gun Control Dies with Rise of Ghost Guns

Democracy is mob rule. Let me just say that so you understand the context of this next statement, which is a twist on the Washington Post’s Anti-Trump slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness. Let me say that they are absolutely right. Democracy dies in darkness, and that’s a good thing, because Democracy is mob tyranny, nothing more. But the Washington Post got the word “Darkness” wrong, even if the word is symbolically accurate. Democracy dies in Anonymity.

This anonymity is the Achilles Heel not just of democracies, but of all forms of tyranny, including monarchies, oligarchies, dictatorships, etc. Cody Wilson, the Crypto-Anarchist of Defense Distributed, understands this fully well. This is why he is working to create anonymity in one of the most dangerous areas of human reality, from the standpoint of democracies, monarchies, oligarchies, etc. That aspect is in self-defense.

In this day and age, at least as of the writing of this post, 2018, the most effective tool for self-defense is the gun, in all its forms. Cody Wilson is working earnestly on creating, and encouraging the creation by others, of ghost guns, guns that exist outside of the matrix of the coercive enterprise, guns that are untraceable. Cody

Wilson claims that ghost guns are the undoing of gun control, and he’s right.

He sat down with the folks at Reason to explain how gun control “is not dead, gun control is undead.”

“Gun control is not dead, gun control is undead,” explains Cody Wilson, the director of Defense Distributed. “We just keep killing it but it keeps coming back.”

Wilson, a crypto-anarchist and serial “troublemaker,” helped launch the age of the digital gun when he published files showing how to make the Liberator, a 3D-printed pistol, in 2013. It set off a panic in the media and in anti-gun political circles, and the State Department demanded Defense Distributed remove the files from their website.

But five years after the Liberator debut, the technological limitations of homemade firearms have started disappearing. The materials are cheaper and better, the machines are more precise, and the software is more advanced. Groups of hobbyist gun printers started gathering in IRC chats and internet forums, and are working together to make their own gun designs. It’s a new reality that hasn’t entirely filtered into public debates over gun control.

“I like the Liberator, it’s fine,” union carpenter and hobbyist gun printer Darren Booth says. “[But] it’s only good for one shot. I thought, ‘what can I do to make it a little better?'”

Booth developed the Shuty AP-9, a semi-automatic, mostly 3D printed, 9mm handgun based on the AR-15 platform.

Booth is a regular of the FOSSCAD group, and the community worked together to create the digital files for the Shuty. “It’s an open community. It’s an open chat,” says Booth. “Anyone can go on there and just ask questions.” Files for the Shuty, as well as other firearm designs, can be easily downloaded from the FOSSCAD repository.

“I’ve watched some of these groups begin,” says Wilson. “And it’s great. In our earliest days I imagined that that would be what victory looked like. There would have to be communities taking up these projects on their own.”

In late 2017, Defense Distributed released files that allow the Ghost Gunner to mill out unfinished metal handgun frames. Wilson says the new focus on handguns is in part a legal strategy based on the 2008 supreme court case, District of Columbia v. Heller, that affirmed the right to own a handgun for self defense.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv

Governor of West Virginia has signed legislation that will prevent businesses from preventing their employees from storing their firearms in their cars, even if the cars are parked in the business-owned parking lots […]